Dealing with articles like this...

I recently started an article on the Atari Keypad accessory, and started the task of going into the various game articles to backlink to it. In doing so, I came across the article on Star Raiders (a classic Atari 2600 game) here:

http://www.giantbomb.com/star-raiders/3030-730/

There is a TON here. It's also written completely improperly, top-to-bottom for an article. I hate to mow it down and start a stub from scratch, but it's basically a massive ... playguide? Review?

In Googling, I found that's it's either entirely lifted from this:

https://www.purelyonlineracing.com/game/730

OR it was copied. Not sure which came first, or perhaps it's even the same author.

Do I wrecking-ball it and start a basic encyclopedia-style article?

Well I would say it all depends. If it is indeed copied then it needs to completely go and be re-done. However, after skimming it there seems to be some gameplay stuff that could be re-worked and organized better.

@bhtav: Ahoodedfigure wrote that whole page from scratch close to the creation of the site. It was one of the first pages that Jeff highlighted as exceptional wiki work. We've incorporated many rules (stylistic and otherwise) since then in order to standardize the language of the wiki after those chaotic and busy few weeks when there were thousands of wiki contributions from many different sources. As a result, we've got no end of pages written subjectively or like a guide because they were created in a period where nothing was set in stone.

The Star Raiders page could definitely use some work, though there's no reason to scrap the whole thing if most of it's still functional and well-written. There's a lot of 2nd person that needs to go, at the very least. The first (Overview, though it needs to be renamed such) and last (Cultural Notes) sections are perfect wiki material and the middle parts, though sort of guide-like as you say, still describe a lot of the game's novel gameplay features.

If that other site has a carbon copy of this Star Raiders page then it means they probably scraped it at some point during the page's seven plus years of existence. Wouldn't be the first fledgling game wiki site to try to get a head start by copy/pasting our entire wiki database via the API.

Terrible. I would say to scrap it and start over from scratch. It's like a textbook of everything that is wrong with wiki pages. On top of that, who ever writes things like "a depiction of the dynamics" as a header to an article??

P.s. when screenshots have witty captions underneath them that try to be funny? I've always hated that. Not sure why. To me it always comes off as plastic.

The broken images on the linked site are trying to source from static.giantbomb.com... So I'm gonna say it was copied from here to there, not the opposite.

@mento: @egg:

Mento - thanks for the backstory, that makes a bit more sense; Egg - I'm inclined to agree actually, just about everything is written with the wrong tone. Regarding the witty captions thing: 1) They're almost never witty; and more importantly 2) They are entirely un-encyclopedic. There's a spot to write reviews in one's own ... hilarious voice, the wiki isn't the place for it. I'm constantly revising headers to something descriptive.

I'll defer to Mento, and see if I can use a scalpel rather than a hatchet. I understand this isn't wikipedia, and there is no limit to the amount of quality information on any given game (especially a classic like Star Raiders). How much you wanna bet robot math gives me about 4 points for a massive edit. ;)

Here goes nothing...

Whew. Alright, that's a first pass. I've chopped a ton, improved readability, gotten rid of all subjectivity and first person, re-wrote a lot of the controls and intros etc etc etc etc (etc etc etc)... I haven't tackled the bottom cultural notes section. It makes some sense to put it in historical perspective; the original author is right, there are a good deal of allusions to then-popular sci-fi. I'm continuing this thread here, because I feel that we really need a good template article for what an old game wiki page can and should look like. It's the perfect subject, as few games of the era have the complexity to warrant so thorough a piece.